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Saturday, March 04, 2017

Paul Feyerabend and the debate over the philosophy of science | OUPblog

Photo: John Preston

"Paul Feyerabend (born 13 January 1924, died 11 February 1994) is
best-known for his contributions to the philosophy of science, which is
somewhat ironic because, I suspect, he wouldn’t have thought of himself
as a philosopher of science." summarizes John Preston, Professor and Departmental Director of Teaching and Learning in the Philosophy department at the University of Reading. He is the author of the Paul Feyerabend article for Oxford Bibliographes in Philosophy.

Photo credit: Title page of Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) by H.
Institutoris, a widely-read medieval text on the extermination of
witches. Wellcome Images, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t just mean he wouldn’t have thought
of himself as just a philosopher of science. No, I mean that he
thought of himself as a thinker for whom disciplinary boundaries meant
absolutely nothing. In his later years, he even denied being a
philosopher. But right from the time when he really found his feet as an
independent thinker (independent of those philosophers under whom he
had studied and worked), Feyerabend’s
tendency was to range over enormous swathes of human thought, without
regard to their supposed differences and boundary-lines. This is partly
why in his books and articles one encounters not only the usual
philosophical suspects, but a huge range of thinkers including
scientists of every persuasion (of course), the Church fathers, the
authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, historians, playwrights,
poets, political thinkers, anthropologists, and astrologers. (It’s this
quality of enormously wide intellectual range, I have to say, which
first attracted me to his works). One of the reasons Feyerabend came to
despise contemporary philosophy was undoubtedly that it no longer
features, and perhaps can no longer really feature, the sorts of figures
he most admired, such as his fellow boundary-striders Ludwig Boltzmann,
Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein, for whom the expression
‘philosopher-physicists’ was invented.It’s also ironic because although Feyerabend was a fervent admirer of
certain scientists, he also supplied, or canonised, a perspective on
knowledge which gives science no special or privileged place. This was
cemented fairly early on in the book which made his name, Against Method (1975), in which he put forward the idea that there is no scientific
method, partly because the greatest scientists have been nimble,
opportunistic thinkers who, despite pretending to follow the kind of
methodological rules that philosophers and science textbooks posit, were
always prepared to cast them aside when they got in the way. Although
Feyerabend had some influence on important figures within the philosophy
of science, such as Bas van Fraassen, Ronald Giere, and John Dupré, the
real impact he made was outside philosophy, since he became known in
other disciplines as an ‘epistemological anarchist’, and the idea that a
philosopher of science could have that reputation gave impetus to
relativistic tendencies of many different kinds outside philosophy, for
example in archaeology.

This reputation itself gave rise to the accusation that Feyerabend was
‘the worst enemy of science’ (Theocharis, T. & Psimopoulos, M.,
“Where Science Has Gone Wrong”, Nature, 1987, p.596). He certainly didn’t mean
to be that, and his fans have enthusiastically sought to defend him
from this accusation. One can see where the critics are coming from,
though. For the way in which Feyerabend envisages evaluating science is
somewhat unusual. His work seems to disallow, or at least discourage,
any attempt to evaluate different approaches, including science, in
genuinely epistemic terms. That is, he was deeply sceptical of any
attempt to say that one approach, or theory, constituted knowledge where
another was mere opinion. And this scepticism extended, I believe, even
to much more qualified terms of epistemic appraisal, such as claims
that one approach or theory was better epistemically justified than, or
more probably true than, or even just closer to the truth than, another.
However, this doesn’t mean that Feyerabend envisaged no way of
evaluating approaches. Rather, he encouraged us to evaluate approaches,
including science, in terms of their contribution to human happiness. I
worry that although one might apply this suggestion at a very general
level, to the comparative evaluation of world-views, it doesn’t really
tell us anything about how to evaluate different theories within science.Read more...

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.